Thursday, March 29, 2012

What do feminists want for women?

Hat tip to Laura Wood for this story. Hanna Rosin is a feminist writer whose latest piece for the Wall Street Journal brings the feminist agenda for women right out into the open.

In short, Hanna Rosin supports the sexual revolution because it allows women to use short term relationships as a way of delaying family formation till their mid to late 30s. She recognises that this causes a player culture to develop amongst men, which brings "heartache" to women, but thinks this is a worthwhile trade-off for women gaining power and autonomy through careers in their 20s and early 30s.

But now the sexual revolution has deepened into a more permanent kind of power
for women. Young women in their sexual prime—that is, their 20s and early
30s—are generally better off than young men. They are better educated and earn
more money on average. What made this possible is the sexual revolution—the
ability to have temporary, intimate relationships that don't derail a career. Or
to put it more simply, to have sex without getting married.

It's true that the new wave of girl sitcoms and single-girl memoirs these
days are full of complaints about boys who won't commit. But you have to take
these complaints with a grain of salt. These days the problem in the dating
market is caused not by women's eternal frailty but by their new dominance. In a
world where women in their 20s are, on average, more successful than men, dating
becomes complicated. Women no longer need men for financial security and social
influence. They can achieve those things by themselves. No one is in a hurry to
get married, and sex is, by the terms of sexual economics, very cheap. When sex
is cheap, more men turn into what the sociologist Mark Regnerus calls "free
agents." They sleep with as many women as possible basically, because they
can.

The result is that the women suffer through a lot of frustrating little
dating battles. But this is only a small part of the picture. Women these days
understand that their sexual freedom—even if it causes them some amount of
heartache—is necessary for their future success. As an in-depth 2004 study of
the hookup culture by University of Michigan researcher Elizabeth Armstrong
showed, women are not, as the stereotype goes, always pining for marriage while
the men turn them away; quite the opposite. Women use their temporary college
relationships as a "delay tactic," Ms. Armstrong writes, because their immediate
priority is setting themselves up for a career. Thanks to the sexual revolution,
they can have relationships—and maybe some drama—through their 20s and early 30s
and not get tied down with a husband and babies. If the price is a little more
heartache, so be it. These days women have a lot more important things on their
horizon.

It is important that women understand this clearly. Hanna Rosin is not offering a "you can have it all" scenario to women. She is being honest about what feminists value. She does not care if women do not experience love and motherhood when they are in their sexual prime. Family formation is to be delayed to the last moment, when women have passed their sexual prime, in favour of careers, as careers are thought to offer power (over men) and autonomy (from men).

Hanna Rosin is dismissive of the idea that a woman might prioritise the goals of marriage and motherhood; she writes that women have "a lot more important things on their horizon".

It is not a well thought out plan. If women pursue relationships as a "delay tactic," that means they are likely to favour inappropriate men (i.e. men who aren't marriage prospects). Young men will pick up on the fact that women are no longer favouring family man qualities. So if men are encouraged to ditch family man qualities, then who will these women eventually find to marry them when they are 35? Or 40?

And what will happen to the women themselves? If they sleep around with inappropriate men for 15 years, will they really still be capable of stable pair bonding when they are 35?

Will men who have been encouraged to be players in their 20s, and who have gained confidence in approaching the women of their choice, really be willing to settle down with older women? Won't they tend to favour younger, more fertile women?

And what will be left of "reproductive choice" when a woman starts to look for the right sort of man when she is 35? By the time she's found one, spent time with him, gotten engaged and married, she'll be in her late 30s. She'll then have to rely on luck that she's a woman who can still conceive at that age. Many women will end up missing out on the opportunity to have children, or to have the number of children they want.

Finally, most women end up scaling back their work commitments by their 40s anyway. So what was the great damage to relationships all for? What purpose does it really achieve? Should a woman really give up on love and marriage and motherhood just so feminists like Hanna Rosin can brag about women doing better than men in their 20s?

Hanna Rosin is inflicting serious losses on both women and men. Both women and men will be left to mourn the youthful love that will never be, the children that will never be and the grandchildren that will never be seen.

A traditionalist culture would decisively reject the values held by Hanna Rosin. It would put love - marital love and parental love - as a higher value than the autonomy or power gained through careers. It would encourage women to act in a timely way, when still in their sexual prime, to marry well and to have children.

59 comments:

Encouraging is fine, but in my view it's the women themselves who *want* this kind of independence because they do not want to be dependent on men for income. Even if they do marry and have children at some stage, they want to have their own independent income stream which would be more than enough to support themselves if they ever want to exit the relationship -- they don't want to be tied into a relationship due to financial dependency.

I don't think that's going to change any time soon, if ever, now that women have the ability to support themselves in a good style. And that's why we're going to continue to see women focusing on career building in the 20s and 30s, even if they know they eventually want a family. It's a big risk management exercise.

Of course, very few women want to end up like Kate Bolick. For most the plan is to marry in the timeframe between 28 and 34, after they have 5-10 years in the career track they are on. But I don't think we're going to see women opting out of this in favor of early marriage and child-raising in exchange for being financially dependent on men -- that's too scary for most women.

That's one of the main reasons why most women support feminism, de facto. It has given them the option to be financially independent of men, which essentially gives them much more freedom in all areas of life. The main "cost" is that childbearing is delayed, but it seems that millions upon millions of women are more than happy to pay this price in exchange for being economically independent.

Feminists created this big lie that before feminism that no woman worked. Utter crap. Religious patriarchs used women as servants, maids and other things. Before feminism men worked full-time and women worked part-time or temporarily. That is still the case, even in this feminist utopia. That may be "low and light labour" for women but it's still labour. It's the same feminist crap about how past generations though that men were emotionless and women were emotional. I'm sorry but just because men express emotions differently than women that makes them emotionless? Thank you crazy feminists. Young women who become wives and mothers in this day and age have nothing to fear. They are far more grounded to the floor than powerful independent contraceptive using promiscuous liberated college-educated women with their humongous debt and no jobs prospects. Opps.

No word on who exactly is going to want to settle down with women who have sky-high number counts and tons of emotional baggage. Knowing what we know now about oxytocin and the failure women high-count women to be able to bond long-term to men, what man would risk his future earnings and kids to such women?

If American men are smart, it won't be them. Maybe it will be other women, which will really get feminists excited.

Having a career is not something I consider fun or rewarding as such. Sure, it's rewarding at times and can even be fun on a rare day. However, 99% of the time it's 10 hours or more each day at the grind. Why would any sane person think that a 10 hour day of pure work, for no other reason than to be 'independent' is a worthy goal?

I imagine most of our parents and their parents before them had careers and jobs in order to have a 'family'. Not the other way around. If you don't intend having a family, why work more than what is absolutely necessary to survive?

These feminists are nutjobs, there's no other word to describe them.

Women must feel free to work as much as they like, just don't expect a proposal at any age. Remember, women are independent now, they don't need a man. They should show this by not getting married or having children, two things very dependent on a man.

If you don't intend having a family, why work more than what is absolutely necessary to survive?

To become a part of the greedy capitalist elite which runs the world and have millions of dollars in your pocket to buy useless stuff that only satisfies one's vanity and emptiness? Feminists are corporate/government whores to the maximum. They have completely perverted the concept of a job and a profession. Did men and women in the past act towards their job like feminists do today? Heck no. Society wasn't dominated by the economic man. Everybody understood that BOTH culture and economics matter in the end.

Well, the point is that women do not see why they can't "do both". That is, have financial independence *and* marriage and kids. And, to be honest, for upper middle class American women, it's not a very uncommon scenario, really. Of course, they have small families of 1-2 kids generally, and only begin them in the early to mid 30s, but they are "doing both". It's tremendously exhausting as a lifestyle, but these couples have pretty low divorce rates, at least in the US.

While I generally agree that the impact of this overall, outside of the UMC, is negative, I can very much understand why women don't want to be dependent on men financially. As a man, I would not want to be dependent on anyone else financially, either, if I had a choice. That doesn't mean I worship my career -- it's a grind, as you describe. But it's better than being dependent on someone else financially. I think many women feel the same way, especially in a world like ours where relationships, even marriages, are often temporary. There's a great deal of uncertainty involved, and I can very well understand why women want their own good source of income -- the kind of income they can live a good life on without being dependent on someone else's income.

This doesn't mean women do not *want* men -- they do (well, the hetero ones do, which is most of them). And most want kids, too. But they don't want to be financially dependent on men just to get these things. I can understand that, because it makes sense.

Of course this has very negative aspects, such as the development of a hook up culture, a player culture, the carousel riding culture and the like. All of that exists because women are not settling down (or demanding/expecting that men will do so) until the later 20s and early 30s. But I don't see a way out of it, on the broader level. If given the choice between being dependent on someone else and not, most people are going to choose not to be -- men and women alike. And I don't see how a free society would ever take those choices away from women in any meaningful way now.

It's tremendously exhausting as a lifestyle, but these couples have pretty low divorce rates, at least in the US.

This is a big statistical misinterpretation. They don't have low divorce rates at all. Their divorce rates match the general population (around 40-50%). If I were you Brendan I would take what most liberated college-educated women say with a grain of salt (including their claims that they have low divorce rates).

The point of this whole charade is to show that women don't need men. Isn't that so? They can have it all without men, right?. Which is a bald faced lie, if I may add. They can't, nature simply doesn't allow them this, it doesn't allow it to men either. They are living a lie and I will not encourage it. They MUST live with the consequences that their actions bring.

The whole point of countries, communities and families is to be DEPENDENT on other people so that we can 'collectively' focus on improving humanity. To merely think of life in the abstract term of 'individuality' is the most selfish thing a person can do.

Those middle class American women you talk of don't deserve to have marriage or children, they are selfish to the extreme. Merely eating food at night requires you be dependent on farmers. Merely having electricity means you are dependent on the miners, technicians and other experienced men who do these jobs. Women certainly don't do those ill suited jobs, do they? Furthermore, they put their happiness, their career and their feminist agenda as their primary and more often to not, their only agenda. Men and family mean squat to these women and I think their actions should reflect that.

If they don't need men, they should not get married or have children, to do so is to go against their creed and be nothing more than hypocrites.

These women are as 'dependent' on men as they have always been. There is no denying it. The government has simply moved the burden from the single 'husband' to men at large within society.

That's all that has happened with the coming of the 'sexual revolution' and 'independance', lol, of women.

Statistically college educated people in the US who are married have the lowest divorce rates of any demographic.

See: http://stateofourunions.org/2010/SOOU2010.php

That's by the "National Marriage Project" at the University of Virginia, an entity that has been roundly critiqued by feminists in the past due to its pro-marriage stance overall.

The difference is not slight - the highly educated have ~11% chance of divorce within the first ten years as compared with a 37% percent chance for the "modestly" educated (some college but no degrees) and 36% for the least educated (no college). That's a pretty big difference.

I don't think the point was to have all women raise children alone -- most women don't want that, if they have a choice in the matter. The point was to give women the independence financially both to (1) choose mates more freely and according to other criteria and (2) leave relationships more easily without being financially tied to their husbands. In other words, more freedom overall, and a backup plan if things don't work out. Most women don't want to live without men, but only very few want to be fully dependent on *one* man. This is understandable given the divorce rate.

And, as I stated above, it is extremely doubtful that these choices will be taken away from women any time soon, if ever. Therefore this is the context in which we must operate. It's true that *some* women will not make that choice (that is the case today as well) -- it just won't be most women, and certainly not most women who are highly educated.

I can very much understand why women don't want to be dependent on men financially

But the irony is that when women do the careerist thing in their 20s and early 30s the cost of housing shoots up (dual income no kids) which makes it difficult for women to live independently on their own wage anyway (well, that's the case in Australia).

I'd point out too that a lot of women in their 20s are using their income not to achieve financial independence but to buy expensive shoes & handbags, to rent a trendy inner-city apartment, to go to cafes and so on - to live a certain premarital lifestyle.

Also, there are many women who aren't making the 34-year-old cut-off for having kids. In the UK, 43% of 33 to 46 year-old women with a university education are childless.

Also, whilst it's no doubt true that the prevalence of divorce will make women more wary of financial dependence, the divorce laws and state welfare operate in a way that is pretty favourable to women.

What should really concern us about Hanna Rosin's attitude is the value system she operates with. She places love between men and women, and love between mother and child, in the unimportant category.

Imagine you are a 20-year-old man who would like to find love and you find yourself socialising with a group of women who have taken on board Hanna Rosin's set of values. You are going to be disoriented.

One final point. Let's say that women really were acting to achieve financial independence of men. That too would be highly disruptive to relationships. Most men are not by nature careerists or materialists. They do the career thing because they have a masculine instinct to be a provider and protector.

But if women are self-providers, then why should the average man bother? Particularly if women are delaying family formation until their mid-30s.

I can understand why men, in this scenario, would spend their 20s relaxing at their parental home watching TV or playing computer games.

And then women get to their mid-30s, finally ready for family, and complain about their male peers not having kept up.

Brendan, let's not beat around the bush, excuse the pun. Divorce is due to women finding it financially expedient to divorce their husbands rather than work through their marriage problems. Never mind the children, the family or those pesky marriage vows she took, no, they know better.

They don't have careers because they feel they might be left in the lurch following a divorce. That might have been true awhile back, but divorces were far lower then than now, in the region of less than 10 % of all marriages ended in divorce back in the sixties. Now it's over 50 % of all marriages end in divorce. The higher divorce rates are due to the new 'Independent female' and not the cause of female 'independence'.

And they never seem to touch on the point that most men will not marry a 30 + year old careerist women and most will only do it because they see it as a financial decision of adding on another salary to their income.

Therefore, marriage seems to have become a finance issue to your infamous Upper Middle Class American honey pies.

Oh, the love is just over flowing from these princesses!

And Brendan, the situation will change, it cannot continue. The consumer economy cannot hold. Women buy but they don't produce. This will catch up to feminism eventually, granted it will take a few years but as sure as night follows day, there will be a price for feminism's selfishness.

I will not marry one of these women Brendan but I leave them to you and others like yourself who enjoy broken, used and stretched pussy, career orientated women. I do hope you enjoy them. Just be sure to pay that divorce lawyer well as he laughs to the bank on your dime, after having screwed your ex in the board room.

"Also, there are many women who aren't making the 34-year-old cut-off for having kids. In the UK, 43% of 33 to 46 year-old women with a university education are childless."

In the academic and other milieux I'm familiar with, the average fertility rate appears to be about 0.5 - half the adults childless, the rest with 1 child each. It's a recipe for extinction. Catholics are the exception, they still have children.

But if women are self-providers, then why should the average man bother? Particularly if women are delaying family formation until their mid-30s.

I can understand why men, in this scenario, would spend their 20s relaxing at their parental home watching TV or playing computer games.

And then women get to their mid-30s, finally ready for family, and complain about their male peers not having kept up.

What else would they expect?

This is, indeed, precisely what is happening to a substantial degree, at least in the major metros of the US. We are hearing, near constantly now, complaints about this from women (again, at least in the US we are) in the various media. However, I am very, very skeptical that the response of women in the next generation below that will be to opt for financial dependence on one man at an early age over having their own income stream. I just don't see that happening, and I can understand why women don't want to take that risk.

And they never seem to touch on the point that most men will not marry a 30 + year old careerist women and most will only do it because they see it as a financial decision of adding on another salary to their income.

Therefore, marriage seems to have become a finance issue to your infamous Upper Middle Class American honey pies.

Well, plenty of guys are marrying these women in the US. I know it's a popular meme on the internet that no woman over 30 can possibly ever get married to any guy, because no guy wants to marry a "used up 30 year old hag", but the fact is that plenty of women are marrying between 28 and 34 and are marrying their socio-economic and educational peer men. I know of *no* guy among my socio-economic/educational peers (post-grad, professional degree, 250k+ income) who are married to a woman who is also not in this same peer group. Some of the wives choose to become SAHMs when the kids come along, and some don't, but they are all from the same educational and career peer group. And their divorce rates are quite low, too. I know more people who are single and never married than I do who have divorced in this group. Granted this is anecdotal, but it matches what the National Marriage Project study says as well.

If they don't need a guy, why are they marrying? They can either be independent from men or have a family and BE dependent on a man. Else the man is just an accessory to them. And if these men are merely accessories to these women, why should the men put themselves and their future children at risk by marrying or hooking up(co-habitating)with these women?

The men are marrying mostly for financial reasons, not because they actually want to marry these women. And because of the pressure society at large places on them to get married and, what's the word...oh yes, contribute to society. If more of them actually knew the risks and it was explained to them, in detail, you might see a profound change.

Anyway, it matters not. There are more than enough women out there chattering away about men not 'manning up' and that will lead to future laws being passed in favour of women and that will force your higher educated men to change their rationale and that is when things take a nasty turn.

You know it's coming Brendan. The state cannot run on female moxie alone, now can it?

You also leave out the reason that most of these women will lie to their future husbands in order to get married, lie about previous partners, lie about debt, lie about past divorces, lie about her commitments, lie about wanting to keep a career but instead becomes a stay at home mom. You know the drill.

These are not the women I consider marriage material. They have nothing to offer the world besides their commercialism and entitlements. Once again, I'm happy for you to have them.

My point is that these people are getting married. Not to you, clearly. But they're getting married. The US is not like the UK in this respect (yet, perhaps), where marriage rates are very low overall. These people are getting married, and almost all of them are marrying their economic/career peers.

Heck, this is what Charles Murray is talking about in his new book "Coming Apart". In the US currently there is a ton of assortative mating taking place among people with degrees, and it's creating a new, separated, class that has very different characteristics from the rest of the society. One of the characteristics is that it is mostly married, and another is that it has a low divorce rate. Another is that it has a steady but clearly low birth rate. But, for the most part, the women in this group who want to get married do get married. The ones who aren't married are the very picky, or the ones who delay for a very long time, like Kate Bolick (i.e., to late 30s or around 40). Most of them marry in the late 20s and early 30s, again, at least in the US (I realize that it is quite different in the UK due to the crash in marriage rates there ... not sure what it is in Oz).

As for the "why are they marrying if they do not need a man", that's confusing the issue. Women clearly *want* to find a man to marry and have kids with, at least most of them. What they do not want is to arrange their lives so that they are financially dependent on one man -- either in a marriage or afterward. The two are not contradictory.

The real issue for traditionalists who are concerned about the impact of these decisions (low birth rate, increased promiscuity, etc) is what is going to be their "sell" to young women as to why they should choose the dependency on one man option as compared to the maintaining independence option. I don't think there's a great sell, really, to the typical young woman on this issue in terms of the risks, and most of the parents also agree, which is why even "conservative" parents (not trads, I realize, but conservative nonetheless) want their daughters to establish themselves in careers before marrying. It's risk management. The "sell" that these women should forego that and accept the risk of early financial dependence on one man is a weak sell.

Most of those UMC women are government employees, as are their husbands, or close enough. It's not a lasting sort of security, particular since many of those couples aren't having many children and some do choose the permanent DINK lifestyle.

Most women more broadly make poor wages and live it up on credit, which is much more insecure financially than being dependent on a decent-earning man.

"These women are as 'dependent' on men as they have always been. There is no denying it. The government has simply moved the burden from the single 'husband' to men at large within society."

Exactly. Instead of being dependent on men, women are increasingly dependent on the state. When you become dependent on the government you give up your decision-making power to the government. Feminist women haven't yet figured out that that might turn out to be a very unpleasant thing.

The problem in a nutshell: Women don't want to be dependent on men, and feminist society enables them to pretend that they aren't (subsidies, AA, transfer payments, biased courts, &c.). But marriage (and therefore family) is only stable when a woman stands to lose by running out on her man (i.e., when she's dependent on him) and women are only attracted to men with higher status, i.e. men who raise their status, i.e. men on whom they will be dependent for their new status.

The end result of giving women what they want: Familial collapse, followed shortly by societal collapse. Good night, folks. Enjoy the Ummah.

It rather seems that the intent is to drive the fertility rate of the middle class down towards zero.Naturally. Feminism is really a branch of leftism. Leftism's goal is power for itself. The poor all vote for the left. The rich overwhelmingly are leftists. Only the middle class still reliably opposes leftism, and their birth rates significantly exceed that of the left.

Statistically college educated people in the US who are married have the lowest divorce rates of any demographic.

And why is that? Is it because they make better wives or financial insecurity? No. College education has been developing a bigger female to matio ratio (almost 60% to 40%) and this is bound to get worse. A lot of college-educated women are stuck in the single girl lifestyle and don't even get married. For others there are less of their male peers (in their own areas) that college-educated women will marry since a lot of women have taken the spots usely given to the top men thanks to feminist affirmative action and these women will not marry lower-status men. With a dearth of higher status men what will liberal college-educated women do? Either go solo or drop out of the rave. And we know that less marriages = less divorces. If you control this factor, the smaller group of upper-class women have the same divorce rates as the middle-classes. Amazing isn't it how they can fool people?

Heck, this is what Charles Murray is talking about in his new book "Coming Apart".

Brendan, Brendan, Brendan... have you read the famous "The Bell Curve" by Charles Murray? He was SAVAGED by liberals on the press and in the media. Why? He talked about racial differences and he was deemed a racist, a xenophobe and a bigot (big, big no-no for upper-classes whites who live insulated from the lower-classes minorities). Charles Murray is obviously trying to gain the respect and the good graces of the feminist white upper-classes criticizing the lower whites while overlooking the fact that the lower-class minorities are in just of a bad state. If you haven't realize that then I can't help you. Go to Amazon.com and see the reviews. He has 1 and 2 stars from all of those SWPL whites still because of this previous "sin" in talking about racial differences. He concentrates on lower-class whites and not blacks or hispanics because that would be RACIST!

According to inclusive fitness theory, eusociality may be easier for species like ants to evolve, due to their haplodiploidy, which facilitates the operation of kin selection. Sisters are more related to each other than to their offspring. This mechanism of sex determination gives rise to what W. D. Hamilton first termed "supersisters" who share 75 percent of their genes on average. Sterile workers are more closely related to their supersisters than to any offspring they might have, if they were to breed themselves. From the "selfish gene's" point-of-view, it is advantageous to raise more sisters. Even though workers often do not reproduce, they are potentially passing on more of their genes by caring for sisters than they would by having their own offspring (each of which would only have 50% of their genes). This unusual situation where females may have greater fitness when they help rear siblings rather than producing offspring is often invoked to explain the multiple independent evolutions of eusociality (arising some 11 separate times) within the haplodiploid group Hymenoptera — ants, bees and wasps.[13]

"Some of the wives choose to become SAHMs when the kids come along, and some don't, but they are all from the same educational and career peer group. And their divorce rates are quite low, too. I know more people who are single and never married than I do who have divorced in this group. Granted this is anecdotal, but it matches what the National Marriage Project study says as well."

How many of these couples are conservative? I know many couples like this but not too many of them are conservative.

even "conservative" parents...want their daughters to establish themselves in careers before marrying. It's risk management.

Brendan,

I agree that even conservative parents push their daughters mostly along careerist lines.

But I don't think that's due to risk management. I think the parents just assume that nature, or culture, can be relied upon to match their daughter up with a decent husband.

That will increasingly prove to be a false assumption, even for the upper-middle classes.

I have two nieces who are gorgeously beautiful, nice and intelligent. They are both lawyers. I don't like the odds of them successfully marrying and having children.

Why? Because they don't seem to need men. They are self-sufficient career girls, they spend their time working and then buying nice things to wear, but the culture doesn't really put any pressure on them to turn from mum and dad to form a family of their own. They are just passively waiting, running down their youth, perhaps to salvage something later on.

I would like to challenge parents to think about how they would respond to this situation. How do you get your daughters to be more decisively oriented to love, marriage and motherhood?

I have a daughter so that's an issue I'm going to face later on (she's just a toddler). What I'm certainly not going to do is to endorse the culture which puts careers ahead of family life. Nor am I going to encourage her to set herself up to be independent of men.

It is an aspect of a woman's life, I think, to make herself vulnerable to a man, to place herself in his hands. That is part of the essential relationship between men and women; if a woman does not signal this vulnerability to a man, then how is his instinct to commit his strength to her supposed to be triggered?

„Hanna Rosin is not offering a "you can have it all" scenario to women.”

Not only is she not offering it, she pretty much admits that it isn’t true. She says, after all, that sexual freedom (i.e. not having children) is ’necessary’ for future success. ’Necessary’ is a strong word. As much as I dislike this dumb article – which unsurprisingly perpetuates the apex fallacy, by the way – I’m glad even feminists are finally admitting this obvious truth. I’m somewhat surprised she isn’t demanding higher spending on daycare centers and maternity leave though.

„Women use their temporary college relationships as a "delay tactic," Ms. Armstrong writes, because their immediate priority is setting themselves up for a career.”

This explains why white collar women are delaying motherhood. It doesn’t explain why they are delaying LTRs or marriage. To say that young women aren’t pining for those is inaccurate IMO. I think women are very much eager to find attractive alphas who will commit to them and invest in them. What they’re generally very reluctant to do is reciprocate commitment by staying committed in a relationship.

@dfordoom

Indeed. The situation is fundamentally the same. Women are still dependent on the excess wealth created by men – just not on an individual basis. They make think this is a better scenario, but I’m skeptical. I can understand women who distrust men and refuse to be dependent on them in a relationship. What they tend to forget is that men used to be under tremendous social pressure to invest in women on an individual basis and were essentially not permitted to withdraw such commitment. They also tend to forget that the nanny state may not always be willing or able to pay for their government-supported jobs and welfare checks, to extract child support from their baby daddies. The government is not a bit more trustworthy than the average man. Men may be untrustworthy nowadays, but the reason is that feminism has freed them from their traditional role. Women can only thank themselves. Gender relations are a zero-sum game. When women man up, men man down. When women man down, men man up. Really simple.

How many of these couples are conservative? I know many couples like this but not too many of them are conservative.

The ones I'm talking about are across the spectrum, politically.

I would like to challenge parents to think about how they would respond to this situation. How do you get your daughters to be more decisively oriented to love, marriage and motherhood?

I have a daughter so that's an issue I'm going to face later on (she's just a toddler). What I'm certainly not going to do is to endorse the culture which puts careers ahead of family life. Nor am I going to encourage her to set herself up to be independent of men.

It is an aspect of a woman's life, I think, to make herself vulnerable to a man, to place herself in his hands. That is part of the essential relationship between men and women; if a woman does not signal this vulnerability to a man, then how is his instinct to commit his strength to her supposed to be triggered?

I just don't see the strength of the "sell" to the young women themselves, never mind to their parents (which is also an issue). Again, I'm not sure of how the situation is playing itself out in Oz, but in the US it certainly is the case that the parents themselves want their daughters to be set-up career wise *first*, regardless of what happens down the pike in terms of relationships. Very few parents are indifferent about relationships for their daughters, but almost all of them want them to delay this until after careers are set up. It has a strong risk-management element to it, without question, in terms of managing the downside risk. I agree that there is an assumption that the daughters will find men to marry at some point if they "leave it till later" ... but in most cases this is true -- most will find men to marry. The ones who don't are generally either too picky, wait too long (instead of thinking about marriage in the late 20s, they delay until the late 30s like Kate Bolick did) or are very promiscuous in the 20s and have a layover effect from this. The average woman in this scenario picks a man to marry in her later 20s and gets married, and she will, on average, have a few relationships before that. This makes it a pretty hard sell for women and their parents to agree to forego the security of having an independent income stream in order to "take one for the team" in terms of building a better society -- most people don't make personal decisions on that basis, nor do they generally advise their children to do so, either.

I very much agree with Brendan on just about everything he said. My only other comment is that what Rosin describes is only true of women in the top 1/4 of IQs. Most women do not have careers -- they have jobs. Rosin doesn't address these -- I doubt they ever enter her mind, but I wonder how this will all play out for them. They will NEVER become financially independent in any real sense.

The ones who don't are generally either too picky, wait too long (instead of thinking about marriage in the late 20s, they delay until the late 30s like Kate Bolick did) or are very promiscuous in the 20s and have a layover effect from this.

I agree that it is these women who are most likely to miss out. But remember, women are giving themselves a very narrow window of opportunity to get things right. And the statistics from the UK show that large numbers are missing out - 43% of university educated women aged 33 to 46 are still childless.

Furthermore, the women who do succeed are relying on the social capital of the past. They are relying on men stubbornly waiting it out and holding onto a family man ethos.

The reality is that there are many men who experience degrees of demoralisation throughout this entire process. How do they respond? Some delay career commitments. Some marry Asian women. Some become lifelong bachelors.

And even those who do make it through will often be left with very small families of only 1 or 2 children. That's not going to keep a culture going.

One of the easiest bets I could make is that the current expectation in which upper middle-class women delay family formation until their 30s won't last more than a few decades. It causes too much damage - it's not sustainable.

What traditionalists need to do is to talk to those wavering women in their mid-20s who are torn between a commitment to family and a culture which tells them to delay into their 30s.

We can be the ones to encourage the family commitment. I've managed to do that successfully twice with women at work.

And we need to make it clear to parents that by pushing the career first, delay family to your 30s attidue, that they are increasing the risk to their daughters.

They are increasing the risk that their daughters will have to suddenly settle in a panic for a man at the age of 33; that they will experience fertility issues trying to bear children at age 36; and that they will struggle to cope with the transition from long-term self-sufficient career girl to older mother.

And what are these parents thinking when it comes to their sons? What kind of a life are they creating for them? Do sons not matter?

Again, I just don't think upper middle-class parents are thinking things through. They aren't thinking "What's really viable?" They just think there's a prestige in having a lawyer/doctor/MBA daughter and they assume that the family side of things will just naturally work itself out.

Many of these parents are going to be bitterly disappointed when they have to deal with demoralised sons (I have two nephews with career mothers - both have dropped out of their private schools) and daughters who ultimately fail to launch.

I don't think its a matter of "taking one for the team" its a matter of promoting what is valuable. If you promote independence, self sufficiency, total self determination, novelty seeking, and never backing down on personal matters etc, then that is what will be encouraged and acted out in society. People "win" then by going through life single or with tenuous relationships.

Also as Mark said if relationships do go ahead under those grounds what gets traded off? Maybe the man censors his political opinions or behavior continually so as not to offend his wife? Maybe they have 1 or no children and not 2 or more? Maybe a commitment to society gets paid off and a pursuit of fun activities, ultimately resulting in political/masculine impotence, becomes embraced? Maybe as people are under greater relationship pressure they become more self serving in other ares of their lives?

You "sell" family formation by valuing it. The more you value it the higher it gets raised in people's priorities. Many women think that by "breaking out" of traditional modes and models they are advancing themselves and also perhaps advancing society. That is an underlying assumption that must be tested and questioned. Also if family formation doesn't occur cheap arguments like, "there are too many people in the world anyway so its all for the best", can't be allowed to cut it.

Brendan to me seems like the case of a certain (former) MRA who criticizes traditional conservatives all of the time (for supposedly being feminists), that he ended up going to the bed with the (real) feminists.

Brendan to me seems like the case of a certain (former) MRA who criticizes traditional conservatives all of the time (for supposedly being feminists), that he ended up going to the bed with the (real) feminists.

An interesting comment.

My point has always been that while traditionalists have interesting ideas, I don't see it as a viable movement -- that is, I do not see it ever "working" going forward. That's my point of disagreement -- it's tactical, primarily, because I don't see it as being viable, and therefore I see it as sucking up resources that could be used in the short to medium term in better ways (i.e., ways that actually have a better likelihood of success). That's my main disagreement with traditionalists.

Brendan:"My point has always been that while traditionalists have interesting ideas, I don't see it as a viable movement -- that is, I do not see it ever "working" going forward. "

All the Trads have to do is have kids - something they are rather good at, unlike MRAers, WNs, HBDers et al - and for enough of their kids to stay Trad and have kids. At that point they're doing pretty well.

To advance by conversion among the intelligentsia, they should also

(a) continue to work to improve their visibility as a political movement discrete from the churches to which they belong

(b) Welcome allies like me who may not be able to share their religious views, but can see that they are right on the arguments - what is a life well lived, what will ensure future survival of ethnies - especially (but not exclusively) Western ethnies - etc.

I was a bit surprised recently when I commented on Steve Sailer's blog that I must be the only non-religious person to support* Traditionalism, that several commenters chimed in to say that they did, too.

*My parents raised me an atheist, and it's too late for me, but I'm not going to do that to my son. Ideally he'll grow up at least as Christian as the average Brit, marry a nice Christian girl in his (and her) early-mid '20s, and have lots of Christian kids to carry things on.

Traditionalists don't live their values. They provide no support for their wives in maintaining or developing the female-specific infrastructure for home economy and child-rearing and female industry that used to be commonplace even for poor women. You can't advocate for hierarchy and a stable order when you live like the moderns with a flattened, atomic, deracinated family unit.

The UMC layers of nannies and daycamps and playdates aren't perfect, but they more closely model what women used to have that kept them able to support even poor homes on most or all of one male income.

what are your thoughts on the recent Queensland victory for Campbell Newman?

It was a big win, but I find it hard to get excited by state Liberals - chances are there'll be more of the same, though I'd be happy to be proven wrong. I don't know much about Campbell Newman.

The status quo, even for the UMC, isn't sustainable for more than another 10-20 years. And then what?

I agree. I have some family background in the upper middle-class. There is a struggle happening to keep the way of life going, but I think things are slipping. There's a fair bit of downward social mobility amongst the young men, and whilst the women are willing to commit to careers they are diffident about family formation.

I think there are plenty of trads who do live their values when it comes to family.

The bigger problem is not living our values when it comes to community.

The role that men should really have is not only to be a patriarch within a family - not only to fulfil a provider/protector role as a husband and father within a family - but also to be fulfil a similar role within a community.

That was understood in classical times and it's something we'll have to try to revive - a masculine sense of responsibility not only for one's own family but also for a larger community.

When I see a bunch of traditionalists pooling resources even in the minor way of all living on the same street in a neighborhood or the same row of apartments in a complex, I'll believe they are living their values. Community starts with a conscious effort towards it. You can't ask women to hop off the careerist mindset and then dump them in isolated individual households with infants and toddlers and few or no interactions with other women, much less other like minded women.

In the days of yore, even poorer women shared out childcare and certain 'big' household tasks, and there was not this bizarre modern notion that mothers exist to entertain individual children all day alone.

Any time someone brings up the absence of care for traditionally women's spheres in trad discussions, a bunch of dudes usually pop along to say that women nowadays are lazy, because they simply don't see or know about the female traditional-work infrastructures of the past.

So when I see trad men appreciating what their wives need to be the most functional and effective trad women, then I'll believe they are living their values.

"In the days of yore, even poorer women shared out childcare and certain 'big' household tasks, and there was not this bizarre modern notion that mothers exist to entertain individual children all day alone. "

I agree with that, and it's a big problem with the "America 1950s" model. Women, even more than men, need to be part of a community to function well.

Mark:"I agree. I have some family background in the upper middle-class. There is a struggle happening to keep the way of life going, but I think things are slipping. There's a fair bit of downward social mobility amongst the young men, and whilst the women are willing to commit to careers they are diffident about family formation. "

From what I've seen of my UMC relatives they're doing ok. There is some slippage, but from a high base and not enough to endanger continuity. Eg one uncle had 3 kids, 2 of them stayed UMC, one went 'alternative'/Crusty and may be lost to the UMC. They were raised financially secure enough that the women don't prioritise career over children. Fertility rate in this generation of UMCs may be a bit under 2.0, but probably around 1.8, and there's a lot of demographic momentum as my grandfather had 4 sons and each of his sons had 2 or 3 children.

The problem is that right below the UMC, the MMC is a demographic wasteland, eg my parents had 2 kids, their 2 kids have had a total of 1 child - and same in my wife's family. TFR 0.5, I'd guess the national average is more like 1.2-1.4. From what I've seen, things pick up only very slightly in the Lower Middle Class, then improve a bit in the Upper Working Class, with a lot of traditionalist men supporting their wives, though in London fertility still very low, lots of only children even here. And then the regular MWC has been largely destroyed, leaving a fatherless, high-fertility underclass.

Why is the whenever there is talk about traditional gender roles and gender differences, feminists and liberals switch to their obsession: the "1950's America"? It's hilarious. You would hard-pressed to believe that they only existed in this time period LOL. Liberals don't get that it's not about time (that's why they call themselves "progressives"). It's about conserving the truth and reality. This truth and reality can manifest in different ways throughout the ages.

To understand how absurd Feminism really is, I only need to imagine my friends going in for "Masculinism". They would be laughed off of the planet by their male friends, let alone the women around them.

Men are dependent to women in ways that is often incredibly destructive to them, in just the same way that young women who rely on a man to materially support them often are.

It's been that way forever. Because it's not part of nature that you get access to everything that either sex enjoys. You have unique advantages and disadvantages, it makes you special.

Feminists are miserable misanthropes, just as they appear to be. Misanthropes make an incredible mess of societies and of people's lives when given the opportunity.

"Good night, folks. Enjoy the Ummah".I do have to point out that if the widespread idea or thinking approaching "all Muslim men/Islamic families are completely strife-free or in completely strife-free relationships" and "feminism doesn't exist in Islam" were true,1. there would be no divorce or temporary marriage in same2. there would be no single Muslim women past say 35 (having been wed before their fertility windows closed)

Clearly, that isn't the case.Muslim men I know tell me that the fantasy of feminism being defeated by Islam is just that.